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Spectres Dead Sonic Cathedral

21.03.16

“Kill our songs,” said Spectres. That’s what they requested from each of the contributors for this total pandemic of a record. Dying, the group’s 2015 debut was an acclaimed prolapse of dank noise and haemorrhaging industrial soundscapes. Through the aural mist, you could just about hear alternative rock song structures holding things together. Dead, a thirteen-track ‘remix’ album, perforates around the needles, shakily fissuring whatever stitched Spectres together in their basic form.

Whatever Dying was, it is no more. This is not so much a collection of remixes as it is a practice in elimination. Some of it resembles nothing other than sheer dissonance. Contributions from Dominic Mitchison, Richard Fearless and Factory Floor are clement reprieves from the ataxia, applying what could be deciphered as a structured time signature. Mogwai’s familiar sugaring of atmospheric post-rock on This Purgatory is the safest; with Stuart Braithwaite playing the role of the prudent elder in a room full of rabid toddlers. But the Blitzkrieg heaved out of Gramrcy’s ‘ardkore spiked take on Lump or Blood Music’s play on power electronics for their own senseless This Purgatory is pitiless. And amidst all of this, we find Spectres themselves in their most hateful, unruly state. Their version of Where Flies Sleep is just suicidal. Painful and corrupting like the onset of some fatal body malfunction.

Where Dying toyed with the idea of a band set to self-destruct, Dead is the like the final current of electrodes shooting out from a defibrillator machine, direct to a beat-restricted heart, before succumbing to an infinite nothingness.